Overachiever (Visual Explication)

After a rather timely recitation from Maia and Tiye, I changed my visual explication to the poem "Overachievers." You can watch an excellent recitation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq8ErEFLm18

I wanted to somehow convey the emotions that the poem made me feel visually. For some reason the mess of a collage just felt right. I used words that I felt embodied the "perfection" that high school students are expected to achieve.

Without further ado, here's my visual representation of the poem "Overachievers."

Money and Poetry

Prompt: Robert Graves said “If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.” Prove this. Or prove it false.

When I first looked at this statement, I struggled with defining either half of the quote, thus making it difficult to prove either way. I decided on two main interpretations of the first statement "If there's no money in poetry" and proved both to be true.


One possible interpretation of the first statement is that poets are unable to earn enough money for a living by writing poetry.

Proof using interpretation one: Assume that there is no money in poetry, or that poets are unable to earn enough money for a living by writing poetry. This means that in order for the poets to earn money, they have to do something that is not poetry. This means that they earned money without using poetry, so it can be concluded that there is no poetry in the way that they earned money, and thus there is no poetry in money.


Another possible interpretation of the first statement is that poetry itself has no money inside of it, meaning that poetry itself has no worth, and as such cannot be used as a currency.

Proof using interpretation two: Assume that there is no money in poetry, or that poetry itself has no worth and cannot be used as a currency. This means that something else must be used for currency (coins, bills, precious metals, etc), and this other currency does not include any poetry. Therefore, the money, or currency, does not have any poetry in it, proving the statement once again.

Random poetry/money sidenote: This is a short poem about money that I remember reading in elementary school to learn about coins. The quote reminded me of this poem, so I thought I would post it here